Pablo Muñoz Payá Arquitectos Sinks a Living Room Three Steps to Open Up an Old Farmhouse near Alicante

Among the olive groves outside Alicante, Pablo Muñoz Payá Arquitectos has reworked an old rural farmhouse for a family that chose to leave the city for the countryside. The house runs to 196 m², and regulations would not let it grow beyond its original footprint. That rules out the usual renovation playbook of adding a glazed box or a new wing, and it leaves you with thick masonry walls, low ceilings and the problem of getting light into a building designed to keep it out.

What we find interesting is how the studio worked around the footprint limit. Since the house could not go outward, it went down and up. The living room floor drops three steps to gain height, and a faceted timber roof opening widens toward the sky to roughly double the daylight entering the main space. The palette stays narrow: oak inside, dry stone outside, white render and clay tile left alone where they still work. The result is a renovation that reads as a careful edit of the existing house more than a new design laid over it.

A Farmhouse That Keeps Its Silhouette

From the approach, the house is still recognisably what it was: a low white volume under a ceramic gable roof, framed by a palm and a pruned olive tree. The studio kept the existing tiled roof and extended it over a former storage area, so the outline of the farmhouse barely changes while the volume beneath it gains a double-height space.

The intervention only becomes legible on the garden side, where a large glazed gable faces the pool and a stone wall runs along the flank. Glass sits inside a traditional profile, so the new opening borrows the logic of the old roof. That restraint is the right call for a building surrounded by working agricultural land.

Three Steps Down

The central move is modest in plan and large in effect. Lowering the living room by three steps solves the low-ceiling problem common to old rural houses without touching the roofline, and it creates a sunken lounge that feels sheltered within an otherwise open plan. The grey sofas sit in what is effectively a pit, with oak slatting on the ceiling and walls wrapping the space.

The level change also does sightline work. From the dining table and the kitchen you look over the lounge toward the large window and the pines and terrace steps beyond, instead of into the backs of furniture. At dusk the glazed gable turns the sunken room into a lit stage seen from the pool, which shows how much the section, more than the plan, defines this house.

A Faceted Roof That Doubles the Light

Above the living and dining areas, the architects extended the old false ceiling into a new roof opening shaped in triangular facets that widen toward the top. The geometry works like a funnel, catching the strong Mediterranean light high up and spreading it down across the timber surfaces. According to the architects, the natural light entering the space roughly doubles.

The panelling is not purely decorative. The wood on the ceiling is acoustic, which matters in a large open room with hard stone outside and glass on several sides. In the dining area, the gable-shaped opening frames the palm, the pool terrace and the stone wall in sequence, so you register the landscape every time you sit down to eat.

Oak as Connective Tissue

Oak carries the interior from kitchen joinery to ceiling slats to bedroom wall panelling. In the kitchen it is paired with dark matte upper units and a warm LED strip under the island, a small contrast that keeps the timber from becoming monotonous. The bedroom repeats the slatted wall and adds a floating timber bed, a quieter version of the same language.

Committing to one wood throughout is a disciplined choice. It lets the varied ceiling heights and the faceted roof read clearly, because the material does not change when the geometry does.

Dry Stone and Moving Water

Outside, the studio uses dry-stone masonry laid with the traditional regional technique, on parts of the façade and on the wall rising above the swimming pool. The rough-cut stone sits directly against a dark mosaic-tiled pool, and a thin steel spout pours water from the wall into the basin. The pool is raised and overflows like a fountain, so it is heard as much as seen.

Black-edged stone steps lead down into the water next to an olive tree, and a series of raised platforms guides you toward the pool and its curtain of water. Stone, water and olive are the oldest materials on this site, and the design lets them do most of the talking.

Outdoor Rooms Under Timber Slats

The surrounding rural outbuildings, previously run down, have been restored and tied together by a new timber porch. Its solid slats on a steel frame organise the route from the entrance to the main living space, and in one spot the pergola wraps around a palm trunk planted in a stone bed. Under it sit an outdoor kitchen and a dining table, effectively extra rooms the footprint rules could not otherwise allow.

The slats cast sharp lines of shadow across the pale render in the afternoon, turning harsh sun into something you can live under. At night the lit stone wall and the outdoor kitchen give the courtyard the depth of a second living room.

Why This Project Matters

Many rural renovations in Spain face the same constraint: a protected or regulated footprint, thick walls and a client who wants more space and more light. This house shows that the answer can lie in section rather than plan. Three steps down, a faceted opening up and a covered porch outside add up to a house that feels considerably larger than its 196 m² without an extra square metre of enclosed floor.

It also makes a quiet case for continuity. Keeping the clay roof, using dry stone with local technique and limiting the interior to oak means the farmhouse still belongs among its olive trees. The contemporary moves are real, but they fit inside the existing house, and that is why the renovation works.

Home Refurbishment for Alejandro and Inma by Pablo Muñoz Payá Arquitectos (design team: Sonia García Pérez, Pablo Marcos Vila, Raquel Miralles Pérez, Gemma Rincón del Río). Location: Alicante, Spain. Area: 196 m². Year: 2022. Photography: David Zarzoso.

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